How To Take a Sharper Cat Photo

If you’re a cat lover and love capturing their unique fur patterns and colors, you may have struggled to capture sharp and clear images. In this post, I will show you some tips and tricks to help you improve your cat photography skills and capture stunning images of sharper cat fur so your cat photos look stunning.

I have been trying to improve my fur photograph quality by taking a sharper cat picture for a while now and I am learning that just getting out into the garden, a park or a city street and practising gives you confidence and helps you learn.

Using your camera helps you remember settings for modes like Aperture Priority*, and Shutter Priority**. If you take your settings one at a time and do what I did here – push each one as far as you can. You will learn what each mode and setting can do, as well as what doesn’t work. which is just as important.

Let‘s Take a Look at My Fur Settings

As your skills grow, you will want to keep improving for your own satisfaction and personal growth as a photographer, even if you consider yourself an amateur, not a professional.

When you work to take a sharper cat photo and get sharp fur much more often ithis is great for rescue pictures, boosts your skills for sponsored blog posts and even lets you think about submitting to print magazines.

It has taken me time to work up confidence and find settings that are starting to work and I want to share them for you. Especially if you aspire to good sharp fur on your pets.

Taking A Sharper Cat Photo

Remember, you lose nothing by experimenting, and you can delete pictures that don’t work. This is the big advantage of a modern digital-based SLR. Download the pictures – delete your disasters after you have taken a good look and learned what worked and what did not.

For these pictures I pushed everything further than I had before.I experimented with close-ups of Dot Kitten our tabby cat to see what would happen.

Cat close-ups are becoming a favourite subject of mine and exploring new areas with a favourite shooting concept means it doesn’t seem horribly unfriendly. [I posted about the amazing effects you can get with cat photo closeups here.]

Dot was in a relaxed mood and I got down to cat level so she was not edgy about the camera. I began to explore the shutter speed and the F-stop with a few adjustments to the light through the ISO button. These may not be standard photography settings but they allowed me to discover how sharp I can get.

Here is what I ended up with:

• ISO 3200
• F-stop at F22
• Shutter speed 1/400

When you explore, never be afraid to make mistakes it is going to happen. You never know what your pictures may teach you!

Useful Photography Definitions

• Aperture Priority* Wikipedia “Aperture priority, often abbreviated A or Av (for aperture value) on a camera mode dial, is a setting on some cameras that allows the user to set a specific aperture value (f-number) while the camera selects a shutter speed to match it that will result in proper exposure”
• Shutter Priority** Wikipedia. “Shutter priority (usually denoted as S on the mode dial), also called time value (abbreviated as Tv), refers to a setting on some cameras that allows the user to choose a specific shutter speed while the camera adjusts the aperture to ensure correct exposure.”
• Definition of F5.6 “Aperture refers to the lens diaphragm. In ‘auto’ mode it is similar to the human eye and narrows when there is a lot of light or widens when there is little light. Aperture is measured in f-stops (for example, f1.4, f2.8, f4, f5.6, f8, f11, f16, f22 and so on).” Australian Geographic

Marjorie Dawson

Marjorie is a motorbike riding blogger and award winning cat photographer who believes that everyone can create impressive cat photographs and fun movies with the camera they carry.

She is a Professional Member of the Cat Writers Association, Kuykendall Image Award winner and published photographer at the Guardian newspaper.